Excerpt: 'The Last Days of Dead Celebrities'

Mitchell Fink, a former New York Daily News gossip columnist and best-selling author, has spent much of his life reporting on the inner lives of celebrities.

In his new book, "The Last Days of Dead Celebrities," he reports on their deaths, examining 15 of Hollywood's brightest stars, many of whom died tragically before their time. His subjects include John Lennon, Lucille Ball, John Ritter, Warren Zevon and Ted Williams.

Despite a harsh-sounding title, the book chronicles each celebrities' physical, spiritual and emotional journeys to their final days.

You can read an excerpt of the book below:

It took a long time for John Lennon to feel comfortable in New York.

Like so many others before him, Lennon had chosen to settle in
the greatest of all American cities after spending a lifetime somewhere
else. New York, in any era, has always promised its new residents lives
of unparalleled excitement, round-the-clock action, and enough culture
and contrasting beliefs to keep them on their toes for centuries.
In public, Lennon seemed to relish the idea of becoming a New
Yorker. "I love New York. It's the hottest city going. I haven't been
everywhere, but it's the fastest city on earth," was how Beatles chronicler
Geoffrey Giuliano quoted the former Beatle in his book Lennon in
America.

Lennon had even told Rolling Stone in 1970 that New York was "the
only place I found that could keep up with me. . . . I'm just sort of fascinated
by it, like a fucking monster."

The trouble with fucking monsters, of course, is that they can often
appear in the guise of an autograph hound, and if the sixties had
provided Lennon with anything, it was definitely enough autograph
hounds to last a lifetime.

Despite his public pronouncements, Lennon was undoubtedly
looking beyond all the noise and fascination of New York on August
13, 1971, when he and his wife, Yoko Ono, moved their belongings
into three suites on the seventeenth floor of one of the city's classic
Fifth Avenue hotels, the St. Regis.

Lennon wanted something else from New York, something far more precious and comforting than the speed of the city. Being in
New York was a chance, finally, for him to get lost, be anonymous,
and walk among thousands of other New Yorkers, free of bodyguards,
in a fatigue jacket, sunglasses, floppy hat, and with body language
that politely suggested how unnecessary it would be to squeal,
scream, cry, or demand an encore.

And for the most part, New York complied because of an unwritten
rule that grants all new New Yorkers the benefit of the doubt. The famous
and the near famous get it, along with the wannabes and nobodies.
You want to be left alone? Fine, New York will leave you alone.
You stay on your side of the sidewalk, and I'll stay on mine. Don't
brush up against anyone else's body, certainly not without saying, "Excuse
me," and life on the street will happily go on. Act like a New Yorker
and you become one. Act like a schmuck, and New York will have you
for lunch.

From the moment they got to New York, the Lennons kept mostly
to themselves and never acted like schmucks. Gone were the lavishly
planned bed-ins and the flip comparisons in popularity to Jesus. Sure,
they protested the Vietnam War and started hanging out with Abbie
Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. But by the early seventies, this was hardly
considered radical behavior. As Lennon found out years earlier, when
you try to force-feed anything to New York, you do so at your own
peril. But ask New Yorkers, rather, to simply "Imagine," and you may
get them for all time. John and Yoko asked little of New York beyond
that, and in return, to paraphrase a Beatles song, New York let them be.

"He liked it when people came up and said hi," Yoko recalled of
those early days in New York. "We had burnt our bridges in London. I
don't think that my people, the Japanese, were thrilled with our situation-
John and Yoko doing Two Virgins, John and Yoko doing bed-ins.
And we didn't have many friends. A lot of them turned their backs on
us. They didn't like our union. They didn't like the fact that we were so
political. A lot of them still blamed me for the breakup of the Beatles.
We were different, and we were hoping that New York wouldn't be put
off by that."

There is no evidence anywhere remotely suggesting that New York
was put off in any way by the Lennons. They were just New York's
newest superstars in a town that had seen many. It's not unreasonable,
therefore, to assume that Lennon might have been caught off guard by
New York's "so what?" attitude toward his fame. Lennon certainly did say at the time that he needed time to get used to the city, mainly because
it wasn't his idea to move there. New York had been Yoko's decision,
and he went along with it. He was quoted in Giuliano's book as
saying, "It was Yoko who sold me on New York. She'd been poor here
and knew every inch. She made me walk around the streets, parks,
squares, and examine every nook and cranny. In fact, you could say I
fell in love with New York on a street corner. . . . Not only was Yoko educated
here, but she spent fifteen years living in New York, so, as far as
I was concerned, it was just like returning to your wife's hometown."
Nevertheless, if behavior counts for anything, New York had yet to
become Lennon's hometown by October 10, 1971. It was one day after
his thirty-first birthday, two days after the release of his landmark solo
album, Imagine, and nearly two months since their move into the St.
Regis. John and Yoko were getting dressed in one of their suites, preparing
to go out. At that moment, and most likely unbeknownst to them,
a Jewish wedding was in full swing in the hotel's main ballroom. It was
in between courses, or that time during most Jewish weddings when the
bandleader picks up the tempo and coaxes guests onto the dance floor.
The bride, who was nearing thirty, had one sibling, a twenty-sevenyear-
old brother, and he was in no mood to dance, or even feel merry.
He just sat at a table looking at his watch, hoping the time would pass
quickly, counting down to the end of his sister's big day. But he knew
there were still hours to go and very few choices to make. Leaving the
St. Regis and going home was not an option. His mother would have
killed him.

But maybe there was a way out: marijuana, the ultimate and least
offensive sixties panacea to everything. You want to put on earphones
and tune into a coded message on The White Album, or something obscure
on a Richie Havens record? Smoke a joint. On the other hand, if
you want to tune out your sister's wedding and feel like you're a million
miles away, even while you're asking a relative to pass the butter, well,
that very same joint will likely get you there. And that's precisely what
was needed here.

The bride's brother had been tipped off during the ceremony that
another wedding guest was holding some good shit. The brother
thought, if he could talk his sister into giving him the key to the bridal
suite, he and this other guest could go upstairs, get high, and then return
to the festivities and hide in plain sight in a decidedly more tolerant
state. No one would even know they had been gone.

Of course, it never occurred to either man that John and Yoko were
even at the St. Regis, much less readying themselves to go out. At that
moment, the only mission facing the two wedding guests was to get
into the bridal suite, smoke their pot, and alter their consciousnesses
to the point where perhaps even the dance floor might not seem to be
such a terrible idea.

But an extraordinary thing happened as the bride's brother put
the key in the door to his sister's room: The door to the suite directly
across the hall opened and John and Yoko stepped out. The boys
would later bemoan the fact that they never had a chance to say hello,
much less invite the Lennons inside for a couple of tokes, a perfectly
reasonable thought that came up only in retrospect. As soon as John
saw these two strangers, he yanked Yoko back inside and slammed his
door shut. It was obvious, even to these two disgruntled, pot-smoking
wedding guests, that Lennon appeared threatened by the close proximity
of other New Yorkers.

There is an old saying from the sixties that goes something like this:
"Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not trying to get
you." Lennon had nothing to fear from the two men who were trying to
enter another suite across the hall. As the two men remembered it, they
had their backs to the couple when Lennon opened the door. Certainly
no remotely threatening gestures were made. And yet Lennon's first inclination
was to retreat and close the door as quickly as possible. Was he
paranoid, or simply startled? Did he sense danger in New York in 1971,
or was he just being careful? Whatever the case, it was clear that he had
not yet made peace with his new surroundings.

Then again, maybe it was just the coldness and formality of extended
hotel life that was getting to him. During the more chaotic
years, when he was a Beatle, a hotel had performed essentially the
same function as a prostitute. In, out, and on to the next town. As opulent
as the St. Regis was, two months there was proving to be more
than enough. The Lennons needed something a little homier, and on
November 1 they left the St. Regis for a Greenwich Village apartment
on Bank Street that was both smaller and homier than their hotel suite.
The basement apartment had only two rooms, a kitchenette, and a spiral
staircase up to a skylight. But the simplicity of it, along with its tranquil
setting in a classic downtown neighborhood, proved more in
keeping with Lennon's desire to blend into New York.

Photographer Bob Gruen was living in the Village then, in an apartment not far from Lennon's small pad. "I heard about it as soon
as they moved into the neighborhood," recalled Gruen. "There was
this buzz, like 'Hey, guess who just moved in.' But this being New York,
nobody bothered them."

On November 6, just five days after their downtown move, the
Lennons ventured uptown, to the famed Apollo Theater in Harlem, and
gave a surprise performance to benefit the casualties of the recent Attica
prison riots. "I went to the Apollo that night," said Gruen, "because
Aretha Franklin was supposed to be there and I was going to photograph
her. As I walked into the theater, I heard the announcer onstage
say, 'Ladies and gentlemen, John Lennon and Yoko Ono.' It was incredibly
exciting. I couldn't believe I was actually going to see John Lennon.
They did a couple of funky songs. Backstage afterward, they were standing
around waiting for their car, and people were taking pictures of
them. So I took a couple of pictures of them standing there. At one
point, John said, 'You know, people are always taking pictures of us and
we never get to see these pictures. What happens to all the pictures?'
"I said, 'Well, I live around the corner from you. I'll show you my
pictures.'

"And he said, 'You live around the corner? Slip them under the
door.'

"I said I would, and I made up a couple of prints," said Gruen. "A
few days later, I went by their apartment and didn't quite slip them
under the door. I rang the bell instead, and Jerry Rubin answered the
door. I said, 'I have something for John and Yoko.'

"And Jerry Rubin said, 'Are they expecting you?' When I said no,
he said he would take the pictures and give them to them."

Gruen heard nothing from the Lennons until their names came up
a few months later when he was asked to shoot pictures of the couple
for a story that a writer friend was doing on the hard-driving rock group
Elephant's Memory. Jerry Rubin had introduced Lennon to the group,
and he was planning to record a few tracks with them for their album.

"The writer asked me if I would like to take pictures of John and
Yoko while he interviewed them," said Gruen. "I said I would definitely
do it, and that's how I actually ended up meeting them.
"I didn't say anything immediately about me being the guy who
was supposed to slip those other pictures under the door because I like
to stay rather quiet when I'm taking pictures," said Gruen. "So I just
took pictures while they were talking. And because the story was about
Elephant's Memory, I wanted to take a picture of John and Yoko together
with the band. They said they were going to the Record Plant that
night to record with the band. So I asked if I could come along. They
said they'd be working, but if I wanted to wait around until the end of
the night, I could take a picture of them with the band. And that's what
I did. After I took the pictures at the Record Plant later that night, I went
home, printed the pictures, and sent them to the magazine that was going
to publish the story.

"I figured that my job was done, and no one else would need my
pictures," said Gruen. "But then, I ran into one of the members of Elephant's
Memory, and he said they'd been trying to contact me because
I had the only pictures of them together with John and Yoko in the
studio, and they wanted to see them. He brought me over to [the
Lennons'] Bank Street apartment and that was the first time we really
got to talk. I spent the afternoon there, talking and showing them my
other pictures. And we just formed a relationship. At the end of that
meeting, Yoko told me to start coming to the studio so I could take pictures
of them. She said she wanted me to be involved with them. And
so that's what I did."

The Lennons obviously liked Gruen's work but, more important,
he had earned their trust. He said he would drop off the pictures from
the Apollo, and he did. He never chased after the Lennons in an attempt
to get more work, and he never tried to contact them after the
Elephant's Memory shoot. He had proved himself without really trying.
He was in.

Elliot Mintz's relationship with John and Yoko began in a similar
fashion. A veteran West Coast public relations executive, Mintz had a
side job in the early seventies hosting a nighttime radio show on
KLOS-FM, the ABC affiliate station in Los Angeles. In 1971, he interviewed
Yoko by phone, and then sent her the tape. "John apparently
heard it and liked it," recalled Mintz. "Yoko then suggested that he,
too, should do a phone interview with me, and he did it. A few days
later, he called me to say that he was pleased with the way the interview
went. He just liked the texture of it. Thus we began a telephonic
friendship, John, Yoko, and myself, and we'd all speak virtually every
day or every night for months. I'm an insomniac. I don't sleep. I'm up
until 4 A.M., Pacific Time. That was their wake-up time in New York. So
we would talk all the time."

By the spring of 1972, one of the subjects that monopolized these late-night talks was Lennon's desire to see America. And in this regard,
he was really on even footing with his wife. Yoko might have
thought of herself as a New Yorker by virtue of her fifteen years there,
but when it came to the rest of the country, she was as much of a
tourist as her husband.

"John had seen the United States only from an airplane, as a Beatle,"
said Mintz. "And Yoko had never seen the United States, outside
of New York. So they got into this old white Nash Rambler, with a
driver, and they drove from New York to Los Angeles, stopping off
along the way to sleep, to go to all-night diners and twenty-four-hour
coffee shops. Imagine yourself in 1972 sitting in an all-night coffee
shop in Nevada and John and Yoko walk in. Well, as they got closer to
Los Angeles, they took a wrong turn on the freeway and wound up in
a field near Santa Barbara. And they called me and said they would
like to meet me. Of course, I knew what they looked like. But they had
never seen me. I drove up to Santa Barbara, found the white Rambler,
got into the car, and we hugged. That's how we met."

Mintz's long phone calls with the Lennons continued unabated after
the couple returned to New York. He talked them through their
move from Bank Street to the Dakota, the landmark apartment complex
on the corner of West Seventy-second Street and Central Park West.
And he came to New York often to be with them for most special occasions,
including the birth of their son, Sean, in 1975, and most of
the traditional holidays. In the process, Mintz, like Gruen, proved to be
someone the Lennons could trust.

"From the time that I met them to the time that he ran out of
time, I spent most of my Thanksgivings, Christmases, and New Year's
Eves with them," said Mintz. "I live alone in Los Angeles. I've never
been married and I have no children. They were my extended family.
But I want to make one thing clear: I never worked for John. There's
probably been a misconception about that over the years. But no dollars
ever traded hands."

The Lennons used some of the money they never gave Mintz to
eventually purchase five apartments in the Dakota, two for actual living
and three smaller spaces for employees and storage. The highlights
of their eight years together at the Dakota have been well-documented:
In the fall of 1973, John and Yoko separated. He went to Los Angeles
with their secretary, May Pang, while Yoko remained in New York by
herself. John said at the time that Yoko kicked him out. She said the separation was inevitable, and added that it might actually do him
some good.

Fifteen months later, in January 1975, John returned to New York,
reunited with Yoko, and got her pregnant, in that order. The couple's
only child together, Sean Taro Ono Lennon, was born at New York Hospital
on October 9, the very same day that his father turned thirty-five.
By the time Sean was one, John Lennon was experiencing a new
kind of freedom. For the first time since becoming a Beatle, he had no
recording contract, having been dropped by his label, EMI-Capitol.
Also during that year, he was finally awarded a green card and the
promise of possible U.S. citizenship. And, most important, he had
this one-year-old baby whom he desperately wanted to be with night
and day.

With no professional commitments hanging over his head, and
money issues nonexistent, Lennon retired from show business, beginning
what Mintz described as "John's cocooning period."

"Between '75 and '80, he was with Sean every day," said Mintz.
"And all those stories you've read about Yoko taking care of business
downstairs and John being the house husband, in spite of anything
anyone's ever said to the contrary, those stories were all true."
Many writers over the years have attempted to debunk the image of
Lennon at home doing the chores, most notably Albert Goldman in his
book The Lives of John Lennon. Goldman always asserted that Lennon
made up this "big lie" about his housebound lifestyle to reinforce the
validity of his wife's business skills in hopes that the public would take
her more seriously.

For his part, Lennon remained totally consistent about the quieter
life he was leading after Sean's birth. "I've been baking bread and
looking after the baby" was how Lennon began his now-historic 1980
Playboy interview with writer David Sheff. Stunned by Lennon's characterization
of himself during the preceding few years, Sheff asked
whether it was possible that Yoko had been controlling him. The question
was enough to send Lennon into a rage.

"If you think I'm being controlled like a dog on a leash because I
do things with her," Lennon said, "then screw you! Because-fuck you
brother and sister, you don't know what's happening!"
Lennon went on to say that his wife was the teacher "and I'm the
pupil. . . . She's taught me everything I fucking know. . . . She was
there . . . when I was the 'Nowhere Man.'"

According to Mintz, Lennon's version of how he and Yoko led
their lives in the late 1970s "is 100 percent accurate."
"That's what he did," said Mintz. "He cocooned. I don't think that
reading Rolling Stone was so important during those years, and I don't
think he paid that much attention to trends in music.

"But all during this so-called silent period, John remained incredibly
interested in current events and politics," said Mintz. "He read the
papers every day, and he used to call me to watch the evening news,
which he saw in New York three hours ahead of me. He would tell me
things to look for. He watched a lot of television, nonfiction television,
primarily the news. He would have had a field day with all the cable talk
shows today. He wouldn't have slept. He would have been glued to Fox
and CNN. That's all he would be doing, that and sending e-mails,
which hadn't been invented yet.

"But he was very up on the politics of the time, and, of course,
John's political persuasions are extremely well known, so you can
imagine his overall feelings about the emerging Reagan administration
and the conservatism in the country," said Mintz. "And it has also
been well documented that John continued to be under constant FBI
surveillance, which he always viewed as a force with which to be reckoned.
John and Yoko never told anybody how to vote. And John never
voted because he wasn't a citizen. So he had no political party affiliation.
He basically felt that both parties were about the same. Having
said that, I do think that the coming emergence of Reaganism did
send a chill up his spine. Not because of Ronald Reagan himself, but
because John perceived that the country was moving in a direction
that was the antithesis of the things he embraced in his life, like 'Give
Peace a Chance' and the point of view expressed in 'Imagine.' If
Ronald Reagan had read the lyrics to 'Imagine,' he probably would
have recoiled in horror."

It was one of the few times in Lennon's life, according to Yoko, that
he didn't purposely go out and make waves. "You must understand,"
she said, "we had a very difficult time with immigration. But when
John finally got his green card, he thought, well, he has a son, he has
his green card. Maybe this is not the time to be too dangerous."
Then came the summer of 1980. Against the political backdrop of
fifty-two Americans still being held hostage in Iran, which greatly
diminished the chances of Jimmy Carter's reelection bid and made
Reagan look more and more like the next president of the United States,
Lennon traveled with a five-man crew to Bermuda on his yacht, Isis. His
intention was to rent a house on the island and simply while away
his time swimming and sailing. But something else happened on
Bermuda, and it turned out to be a burst of creative energy that saw him
writing more than a dozen songs in three weeks.

He knew Yoko also had been writing songs in New York, and they
would spend days on the phone singing their latest compositions to
each other. It was clear to both of them that they would start recording
a new album as soon he got back.

"He was so excited on the phone," recalled Yoko. "He said, 'I wrote
two songs.'

"And I said, 'I have two songs. Let's make an EP.'

"And then the next day, he said, 'Now I have two more.'
"And I said, 'Well, maybe now it should be an album.' That's how
it started. We decided to work on a theme, and he was very excited
about that. He just kept thanking me and thanking me."

On Tuesday, August 5, John and Yoko entered the Hit Factory, on
West Fifty-fourth Street in New York, to begin recording the album,
Double Fantasy. Producer Jack Douglas was at the controls, and photographer
Bob Gruen was given almost free reign to document the
sessions with candid pictures.

"I visited the studio on and off from late summer through the end
of the backing track sessions," said Gruen. "I was there a number of
times while they recorded. We really had no set appointments. I just
did things as the situation came up. John was extremely positive about
the music he was making, and excited to be back in the studio. He was
coming from a position of real strength in his life. He had spent five
years out of the limelight, and he had taken time to raise his son and
learn about parenting and about living.

"The album was to be about the relationship between a man and
a woman," said Gruen. "And in that regard it was very much a John
and Yoko project, not just John Lennon. A track of his would follow a
track of hers, and then they'd stop to talk about their feelings and deal
with the relationship. To me, he appeared so grounded."

"I had been in a hundred recording studios with different artists,
and I'd been with John in various studios, as well," said Mintz. "The
recording of Double Fantasy was unique because in many ways it was a
metaphor for the way John's life was coming to completion. All these
recording studios-the Hit Factory, where John and Yoko recorded the
album, or the Record Plant, where it was mixed-have closed-circuit
cameras at the front door. They have this so an engineer can see who is
ringing the buzzer. A lot of sessions sometimes go on into the middle
of the night. The studio may not be in the best neighborhood. So they
need these cameras for security reasons. One of the things I remember
about the Double Fantasy sessions was John and Yoko pinning a large
photograph of Sean to the face of the TV monitor above the recording
console. You couldn't see who was outside, but for John and Yoko it
was more important to see Sean staring down at the console.

"Yoko also created this small anteroom just off of the control
room, a white room, twenty by fifteen," said Mintz, "that she made to
look like a mini version of their living room at the Dakota. The lighting
in this room was lowered, and it was filled with candles and incense.
A Japanese woman named Toshi served tea. It was a room John
and Yoko would go to when there was a lull in the session. I remember
going with them into the room. John was wearing slacks and a
jacket and a shirt that was open at the collar. In that room, he spoke
about the project softly, tentatively, and rhapsodically. It was a quiet
room, unlike any room I'd ever seen at a rock and roll recording session.
None of the other musicians or technical people ever entered
that room. It was mostly a room where John and Yoko could relax."

On Thursday, October 9, a skywriting plane flew over Central Park
and spelled out the smoky message "Happy Birthday John & Sean. Love
Yoko." Below the message was a dual birthday party that Yoko threw at
Warner LeRoy's famed Central Park restaurant, Tavern on the Green.
"Mainly we concentrated on Sean," said Yoko. "He had a great time
at the party. It was mostly his friends at the party, kids from school, a
few parents, Sean's best friend, Max LeRoy, and his parents, Warner and
Kay LeRoy. It was John's birthday and Sean's birthday, but John wanted
it to be a day for Sean."

Sean's father kept mostly to himself in the cavernous multiroom
restaurant, watching the party as though he were there as an observer
and not a celebrant. There was, after all, much to reflect on. He was
now forty.

"I don't think he felt forty was necessarily a milestone age for
him," said Yoko, looking back at the day. "I mean, he wrote the song,
'Life Begins at Forty,' which was a serious song when he first wrote it.
Then he listened to his own lyrics, and he said, 'I can't do this. I have
to make it funny.' So he wound up creating a comic song about turning
forty. That's how he wanted to look at it, especially that day. I think he
wanted to play down his age and focus on Sean."

Mintz made one other trip to New York in early November, specifically
to hear John and Yoko's new album. "The engineer would prepare
cassettes for John, and he would take them back to the Dakota
and play them on the little stereo in his bedroom," said Mintz. "He
had none of the fancy equipment at home. He always believed music
should be listened to the way it comes out on a car radio."

Mintz went back to the Dakota with John and Yoko that night,
into what was called the "old bedroom," facing West Seventy-second
Street. John's primitive hi-fi system was on one side of the bed. At the
foot of the bed was a television, a large-screen TV that John had purchased
a few years before in Tokyo. Mintz was with him in Japan
when he bought the TV.

"He was one of the first people to import a large-screen TV from
Japan," said Mintz. "But he really needed a large screen, because without
his eyeglasses on he couldn't see more than four or five feet in
front of him."

John and Yoko's bed was nothing more than a mattress on top of
a piece of plywood, supported on each side by two church pews that
the couple had gotten from an old church in the South. Behind the
bed was a brick wall, and in front of it, up against the foot, was the
large-screen TV. On either side of the television were these two large
old-fashioned dental cabinets, the kind that you might see in a Norman
Rockwell painting from the 1930s, with twenty or thirty sliding
drawers, basically for clothing and John's ties.

"The whole look was simple, and it just worked," said Mintz.
"And the room, of course, was either lit by candles or so dimly lit that
you could hardly see a thing. And that's how I first heard Double Fantasy,
in that setting. John put the cassette on and he kicked back in
bed. He was in his pajamas, Yoko was in her nightgown, and I sat in a
white wicker rocking chair on Yoko's side of the bed. The music just
wafted throughout the open room. And the two of them were very
stiff and quiet. The TV was on, with the sound off. John didn't have
his glasses on, so to him everything was completely out of focus. He
referred to the TV as his electronic fireplace."

When the music was over, Mintz and Lennon talked into the night.
Yoko fell asleep. "She usually went to sleep when John and I spoke,"
said Mintz. "Yoko does not sleep the way most people sleep. She takes
a series of catnaps during every twenty-four-hour period. She'll go
down for two or three hours, come up, do what she has to do, and
when she gets tired she goes to sleep again. She can sleep at the drop of
a dime. She had heard thousands of hours of the John and Elliot dialogue.
And with my kind of late-night FM voice, and John mostly talking
about things Yoko already knew about, I would expect her to fall
asleep. And that night she did.

"John was enthusiastic about everything that night, not only
about the record coming out, but also about what the record symbolized,
and where he was with his family," said Mintz. "A few weeks
prior to this he had prepared his first loaf of bread that he baked in his
oven. He sent me a Polaroid picture of the loaf of bread, which to him
was a symbol of pride that he could do such a thing as create a loaf of
bread. I still have the Polaroid of the loaf of bread. I know there's the
impression that his life was very frenetic, very busy, but in fact it was
Yoko who was generating a lot of the business stuff and taking the
phone calls. John just seemed content with where he was, and completely
at peace in terms of his relationship with Sean. Each night before
he slept, he would put Sean to sleep by cradling him in his arms
and whispering into his ears the various things that the two of them
did that day.

"I asked him about going out on the road and performing live, assuming
the record was a success, and he was affirmative about all of
it," said Mintz. "He basically said, 'Whatever Mother thinks we should
do.' In fact, Yoko had already laid the groundwork for a mini-tour, not
something that would take them around the world on a jet plane, like
Mick Jagger does with the Rolling Stones. It was just going to be some
key locations in key cities."

There came a point in the middle of the night when Lennon was
finally through talking. He wasn't bashful about kicking Mintz out.
He just simply said, "Okay, I think I'm going to close my eyes now."
"He said, 'Let me walk you to the door.'

"And I said, 'John, I know my way to the door.' But he was insistent,"
said Mintz. "So he got up, in his pajamas, and he led me to the
door. There was a chain of bells hanging on the doorknob, on the inside
of their front door. They were Tibetan or Buddhist bells, on a small
chain not much thicker than a woman's large necklace. They rang with
a high-pitched tone, not loud, not like gongs. And as we got to the
door, he turned the knob and opened it, and the bells started ringing.
And for no particular reason that I could discern, he smiled at me, and
said, 'It's our alarm system.'"

Thanksgiving at the Lennon apartment, just a week after the release
of Double Fantasy, turned out to be a simple celebration, with
only three people in attendance that night: John, Yoko, and Sean.
"It seemed like we were the only family we had then," said Yoko.
"Thanksgiving is about collecting your family, and mine was in Japan,
and John's was in England. John was an only child, his parents were
both gone, and Thanksgiving is not an English holiday. So who were
we going to invite? I mean, I could have called Japan, and said, 'Come
to Thanksgiving at our house.' And they would have said, 'What?'
"I didn't cook," said Yoko. "We had turkey brought in. But we
were very into the idea of Thanksgiving. This whole idea of a pilgrimage,
and the white people learning from the Indians, that was an important
concept for Sean to learn. He was born an American, and
Thanksgiving is an American thing. And we were feeling very American
at that time, especially since John had just gotten his green card.
We felt like we were starting over as an American family."

It is no coincidence that the song "(Just Like) Starting Over" became
the album's first single. "It was not written until very late in the
process," said Yoko. "It was like it suddenly came from left field. But
we were starting over in a big way. We had the child we never thought
we'd have. We tried so many times, and I was always having a miscarriage
or something. So this was a big, important thing to us."

And it became a big disappointment when the single did not do
as well in England as the Lennons had expected. "When the single hit
Britain, we thought it would go to number one. When it got stuck at
eight, I felt very responsible," said Yoko. "I felt I had to make sure that
this whole project was good for John. And now the record stopped in
England. I went to John, and I said, 'Look, I'm sorry. It's eight.'
"He knew exactly what I meant," she said. "It was eight, and it was
not going to go up any further. He just looked at me, and he said, 'Hey,
you know, I still have my family.' But he also knew that a lot of what we
did over the years was not popular. He had pride in what he was doing,
and he was doing something he believed in. He was an avant-garde
artist in that way. You do something not because you think it will be
popular. You do it because you believe in it."

Back in California, Mintz continued his regular phone dialogue
with the Lennons, speaking to Yoko daily, and to John maybe three, four times a week. "With the album still relatively new," said Mintz,
"he talked to me about what I thought the public reaction to his
reemergence might be, after all that time away. And I recall asking him,
'Do you care? Does it matter?'
"He snickered," said Mintz. "He said for years he was always concerned
when he saw any of the pop stars in the magazines because he
was never one who enjoyed going to places like Studio 54 and having
his picture taken. Because he had been out of the loop for so long, he
wondered whether or not he would even be remembered, and
whether or not the music would still be relevant or significant. I believe
his questions to me on the phone were more rhetorical than
anything else. He did say that none of his contemporaries had ever
put their women on the same level as he did with Yoko. That's why
Double Fantasy was so special to him, because it was not a reemergence
of Beatle John coming back to say hello again, but a statement
of where he was in his life.

"By this time he had also given up any kind of drug use," said
Mintz. "He was very clear, very in-tune. He would divide his conversations
between what was going on with the music, what was going on at
the house, and what was going on in the political world. Whatever occurred
on the news he would want me to pay attention. He also told me
he didn't feel tired anymore. There was a long period of time that he
complained of lethargy and weariness. But in these few conversations
he was all upbeat."

On Thursday night, December 4, Bob Gruen met Lennon at the
Record Plant, on West Forty-fourth Street, where he was mixing Yoko's
single "Walking on Thin Ice." The song had been hastily recorded after
Double Fantasy was completed.

"They did all their mixing at the Record Plant," said Gruen. "I took
a number of pictures of John and Yoko around the studio that night.
They posed in front of an eight-foot-tall guitar that John had fabricated
for an avant-garde festival. It was too big for them to take home, so they
ended up loaning it to the Record Plant for a while. I knew he had made
it, so I wanted them posing in front of it.

"Then he told me about this coat he had at home, this fancy gold
and red braided jacket with Japanese writing on it," said Gruen. "He
wanted me to shoot pictures of him wearing this coat, so we made another
plan for me to come back the next night, and I did."
While Yoko spent most of Friday night, December 5, putting various vocal effects on her single, Gruen sat with Lennon on the floor of
the Record Plant and talked.

"For a long time we talked about the future," said Gruen. "He was
very excited that he had come back, and very excited about what Yoko
had managed to do on the album. He was really amused by the fact
that she was getting great reviews and that her music was being called
new and interesting, as opposed to his music, which some critics
called a bit tamer and middle of the road. He was very excited about
that because he really liked Yoko's influence. He also talked about taking
a couple of weeks off for the holidays, and then he wanted to start
rehearsing with a band and record some videos by the end of January.
He estimated that they'd probably be performing live by March. He
even talked about the possibility of doing concerts in Japan. We both
had a common interest in Japan. We were talking about places where
we were going to go shopping, and restaurants where we were going
to eat."

It was dawn on Saturday, December 6, by the time Yoko finished
her work in the studio. All during the night Lennon never put on the
braided jacket, and now he was carrying it over his arm as he walked
outside with Yoko and Gruen.

"It must have been six or seven in the morning when we got outside,"
said Gruen. "I asked John if we could take the pictures right then,
and Yoko said, 'Oh, I feel tired. Let's do it another time.'
"And John said to her, 'Look, you've kept him up all night. Let's
take some pictures.' So he put on the jacket and I took about half a roll
of pictures out on the sidewalk. A car was waiting for them. John said
to me, 'See you later,' and they left."

That afternoon, Lennon went by himself to his favorite West Side
haunt, Cafe La Fortuna, a small Italian coffee shop on West Seventy-first
Street, just around the corner from the Dakota. John and Yoko were regulars
at Cafe La Fortuna, right from the time it opened in 1976. They
would often go in together, with or without Sean, and there were many
more times that Lennon could be found there by himself, drinking cappuccino,
nibbling on Italian-made chocolates, reading the newspapers,
and talking with the restaurant's owner, Vincent Urwand.

Lennon viewed La Fortuna as a safe haven, and over time he established
the kind of relationship with Urwand that allowed for much
teasing and playful banter. Urwand even teased him that day about
Double Fantasy."Look, you've had all those years of wildness and success in the
Beatles," Urwand was quoting as saying in Ray Coleman's exhaustively
researched John Lennon biography, Lennon.

"You don't need the money," argued Urwand. "What are you doing
all this for? You're enjoying being a husband and father!"
According to Coleman's book, Lennon responded first by laughing,
and then saying to Urwand, "I swore I'd look after that boy until
he was five, and he's five and I feel like getting back to my music. The
urge is there. It's been a long time since I wrote a song, but they're
coming thick and fast now."

Back at the Dakota that night, Lennon phoned his aunt Mimi, his
mother's sister and the woman most responsible for his upbringing,
and gushed about the new album. Coleman documented the exchange,
quoting Lennon's aunt as saying to him from her home in England,
"John, you're an idealist looking for a lost horizon. You would make a
saint cry!"

To which Lennon responded, "Oh, Mimi, don't be like that. . . .
I'll see you soon and we'll bring Sean. Goodnight, God bless, Mimi."
John and Yoko also talked that night about their planned trip to
San Francisco. They discussed leaving New York on Wednesday, December
10, which would give them a few days to do nothing prior to
their weekend appearance at a rally to help Asian workers gain the same
kind of equal rights and equal pay as their Caucasian colleagues.
"It was about Asians, and we have an Asian kid," said Yoko. "John
really was looking forward to that benefit. When he said, 'Okay, let's do
it,' it meant another kind of beginning for us, one where we could once
again take a political stance in public."

On Sunday night, December 7, Lennon sat down with the cassette
to Yoko's single "Walking on Thin Ice" and proceeded to listen to it over
and over again. "He listened to it like crazy, all weekend long," said
Yoko. "It almost drove me crazy. There's this room in the apartment,
overlooking the park, and he was lying down on the couch, or half sitting,
with his legs on the floor. And that Sunday night, he just kept listening
to the song, and listening to the song. I went to sleep. And when
I came back into the room early Monday morning, he was still listening.
He said it was the best song I ever wrote, but there was something
else going on. The song is really a very strange song. But at the same
time there was something in the air that was starting to accelerate. I
felt an incredible vibe around us. Not an actual noise, but a strong
vibe circling us. I started talking to him over that vibration. I said, 'John,
good morning.' And he was still listening to the song."

Later that morning, Lennon had his hair cut at a nearby salon and
then returned home to do a photo shoot with Yoko for photographer
Annie Leibovitz. At 1 P.M., Lennon did a phone interview with a disc
jockey from the RKO Radio Network. John and Yoko spent the remainder
of the afternoon making phone calls and playing with Sean.
The only real plan they had was to return to the Record Plant so they
could continue tinkering with Yoko's song.

"It was getting late," recalled Yoko, "and we both said, 'Oh, we better
go now.' We were getting to be like this old couple who really knew
each other so well, and knew each other's moves so well. I went out that
weekend and I bought some chocolates because John loved chocolate.
I had gone out to get something, I don't remember what, and I thought,
'Oh, I better get some chocolate for him.' And I did.
"Then I came upstairs, and before I could open the door, he opened
it from the inside, and he said, 'I knew you were coming back.'
"I said, 'How did you know that?'
"He said, 'I just knew.'
"I said, 'I thought of your chocolate, and I got you some.'"
Lennon graciously took the chocolate from his wife and set it
down on a table, but he never took a bite.

At approximately 5 P.M. on Monday, December 8, John and Yoko
came downstairs and were met outside by two fans, Paul Goresh, a photographer
from New Jersey, and Mark David Chapman, a twenty-fiveyear-
old former hospital security guard from Decatur, Georgia. Goresh
had stationed himself outside the Dakota on several occasions, and as
a result his face was recognizable to the Lennons. Chapman, however,
was a new face, and when he thrust his copy of Double Fantasy in front
of Lennon in hopes of getting an autograph, John complied. He scribbled
"John Lennon 1980" on the album, and then handed it back to its
owner.

John and Yoko knew they were not going to pull another allnighter
at the Record Plant. Most of the work on Yoko's song had been
done, and producer Jack Douglas promised that he would have a master
copy finished by 9 A.M. the following morning. The Lennons were
grateful to get out of the studio at a relatively early hour. As Yoko said,
"John wanted to get home early enough to say good night to Sean."
Goresh was already gone by the time John and Yoko returned to the Dakota. But Chapman was still there, waiting. The time was 10:49 P.M.
Yoko got out of the limousine first, followed by her husband. Chapman
said hello to her as she walked by, and then, as Lennon passed him,
Chapman called out, "Mr. Lennon?"

As Lennon turned around, Chapman pulled out a .38 revolver,
dropped into a combat stance, and fired five shots at point-blank
range. The bullets hit Lennon in the back, shoulder, and arm. He managed
to stagger up the few steps to the building's front desk before
dropping to the floor and moaning, "I'm shot. I'm shot."

The desk clerk, Jay Hastings, pressed an alarm button that was
wired directly to the Twentieth Precinct, and within two minutes police
were on the scene. Lennon was taken by a police car to the emergency
room at Roosevelt Hospital, on West Fifty-ninth Street. A team
of seven doctors worked feverishly to save Lennon's life, but the blood
loss was too great, and he died.

"It wasn't possible to resuscitate him by any means," said Dr.
Stephen Lynn, the hospital's director of emergency services.
Chapman, who never left the scene outside the Dakota, offered
no resistance and was taken into custody.

Some years later, Chapman was recorded on audiotape explaining
his actions, portions of which aired on Dateline NBC in November
2005. He characterized Lennon as, ". . . a successful man who kind of
had the world on a chain, so to speak, and there I was, not even a link
on that chain, just a person who had no personality . . . and something
in me just broke."

The news of Lennon's death was announced to a stunned world
by Howard Cosell during a broadcast of ABC's Monday Night Football.
"One of the great figures of the entire world, one of the great artists,
was shot to death, horribly, at the Dakota Apartments, 72nd Street and
Central Park West, in New York City. John Lennon is dead," Cosell said
on the air. "He was the most important member of the Beatles, and the
Beatles, led by John Lennon, created music that touched the whole of
civilization. Not just people in Liverpool, where the group was born,
but the people of the world."

Mintz heard the news, called American Airlines immediately, and
flew to New York that night. "I inventoried all of John's possessions
after his death," said Mintz. "My responsibility at that point was certainly
to Yoko, and she wanted me to inventory his possessions and
place them away for safekeeping. It was an operation that took months.
His clothing came home from the hospital in a brown paper bag. In
the bag was the cassette of 'Walking on Thin Ice,' which suggests to me
that on the final night of his life, in the final moments of his life, that
may have been the last song he ever heard. I always thought there was
a metaphor in the fact that 'Thin Ice' was in his possession when his
life ended at the hands of a man who had obtained his last autograph.
Those two things, taken together, must have made for a strange
crossing."

Yoko didn't notice the chocolate she had brought in for her husband
until days after his murder. It was still sitting on the table where
he had left it. "I didn't like chocolate at all," she said. "But after John's
passing, I thought, 'Should I throw it away? No, that would be wasteful.'
So I said to myself, 'Well, okay, I'm going to eat the chocolate, you
know. And I did."

Mintz, who remains a fixture in Yoko's life to this day, said that
very little about her Dakota apartment has changed since Lennon's
death in 1980. "Everything looks pretty much the same, except she
now has a new bedroom," said Mintz. "She doesn't sleep in the old
bedroom. For months after John's death she slept in their bed in the
old bedroom. For a while, she got solid comfort being in that room.
Now she uses it as a guestroom.

"In terms of how Yoko is doing on a day-to-day basis," Mintz
added, "if she's not traveling, she's in that apartment, most of the time
by herself. There's not much going on. She's devoted her life to his
memories, and she just doesn't laugh as much anymore."